Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday June 21, 2010 @03:18PM
from the more-shouting-imminent dept.

The folks over at VideoLAN are in the process of releasing version 1.1.0 of VLC, and one of the major changes is the removal of SHOUTcast, a media-streaming module from AOL-owned Nullsoft. "During the last year, the VLC developers have received several injunctions by e-mail from employees at AOL, asking us to either comply to a license not compatible with free software or remove the SHOUTcast capability in VLC." Within the license is a clause prohibiting the distribution of SHOUTcast with any product whose own license requires that it be "disclosed or distributed in source code form," "licensed for the purpose of making derivative works," or "redistributable at no charge." The license would also force VideoLAN to bundle Nullsoft adware with VLC. Update: 06/22 00:52 GMT by H: The 1.1 release is ready from their site; you can also read up on the release information.

It's way too late for AOL. They could hand out free puppy dogs and ice cream for the next year and nobody would ever love them again.

All 3 remaining shareholders need to get someone to fire everyone in the top 30% of pay recipients there, break the company into smaller ones with independent leadership and f'ing BURY they name AOL forever. RIP.

The problem is, they'd package the free puppy dogs inside the celophane magazine wrappers and people would be tossing DEAD puppies out in droves. Then you'd have the smart alek posting a website about the 101 things you could do with a dead AOL puppy.

What's wrong with AOL and ME?! I'm runnin' AOL 9.0 right now on my Windows ME eMachines desktop with Norton, McAfee, and XP Antivirus Pro 2010. I got my Yahoo!, Ask.com, Windows Live, Altavista, and Mapquest toolbars for browsing with IE 6.0. I download all the latest movies before they come out, using Limewire, and all the latest cracked video games as well. Whenever my computer slows down I just call my geek friend to fix it.

Were they using the source code from Nullsoft? Couldn't they rewrite the code themselves?

TFA says:

We want to emphasise the fact that features like SHOUTcast or icecast browsing are now doable using our new extension framework and you will find user-contributed extensions on http://addons.videolan.org/ [videolan.org]

Except that they aren't using so much as one line of Nullsoft code. The license agreement in question is a service license, not a software license. It just says that any software that uses the SHOUTcast service cannot be published as source code, or require that it's source code be published, or even allow for people to make copies for gratis.

In other words, it's saying that GPL'd software can't send commands to their server and get back data. No matter who wrote the damn code.

The license agreement in question is a service license, not a software license.

As long as the VLC developers don't use the service, thy cannot be held to any service license.

As such, even though this is 100% free of Nullsoft code, it conforms to Nullsoft's specifications (as if it didn't, it would be unable to interact with the SHOUTcast Directory server), and is thus supposedly covered under the SHOUTcast Directory Service License, as the software uses the service.

This of course is a complete and utter overreach on the part of AOL. If such an interpretation of the law had a chance in hell of prevailing in court, Microsoft would have put an end to WINE years ago.

Just another case of a large corporation abusing copyright law to bully small developers.

Yes, the article and the C&D letters appear to be about the directory service provided by Shoutcast, called Shoutcast Radio. This is separate from Shoutcast, the protocol. The quoted sections posted over at the VLC web site specifically say "Shoutcast Radio" so it's reasonable to think they're talking about the directory service, not the streaming protocol. The protocol itself for streaming the audio is open, and AOL even tried to promote it under the name "Ultravox" and it never seemed to get anywhere. But all I see that the VLC site is talking about is Shoutcast Radio, the directory service.

It's also important to know that the protocol behind Shoutcast serves way more than half a million people. Most iPhone Apps that receive streaming audio are receiving them via the Shoutcast streaming protocol even if they're not using the Shoutcast Radio directory. In many cases the ICEcast open-source implementation of Shoutcast is what's being used. Let's see, CBS Radio (AOL and Yahoo Radio), AMFM's iheartradio, and so many others are using something very much like the Shoutcast protocol, once and no longer known as "Ultravox," for serving iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad clients. I don't know about Android but I would suspect they're using ICEcast since it's the one supported by the Ogg Vorbis crowd, too.

Shoutcast/ICEcast ICY protocol is in so many more places than people know. It might not be purely AOL's Shoutcast by Nullsoft, but it's someting mighty close to it, serving tens of millions of people.

We don't need the Shoutcast Radio directory. That's the technology in question from what I'm reading at VLC's web site.

"Fuck." was my response too. I listen to shoutcast almost nonstop, because I like their high-quality ACCplus (HE-AAC) streams. Only difference is I use WinAmp instead of VLC, but still it's pretty lousy to force the open-source programmers to downgrade their software.

I hate to interrupt a good old-fashioned witch-hunt, but AOL was instrumental in the creation of a little group called the Mozilla Foundation, transferring hardware and intellectual property to them and donating $2 million.

AOL only bought Netscape for the traffic going to the portal site. Management viewed Netscape's software portfolio as unwanted baggage, so they jettisoned that as early as they could, getting as much goodwill and publicity out of it as possible. $2M is chump change for a company bringing in over a billion in cash every year.
The irony is that immediately after taking over, traffic on the Netscape.com portal site dropped by 90-95%. AOL has an amazing talent for buying high-traffic web properties and turning them into low-traffic ones. Having witnessed it first-hand, the disconnect between AOL's management and reality is utterly mind-boggling./ex-AOL employee

I agree, yet by the time they bought them, Netscape was a sad shell of company that didn't know it was dead yet. Nobody was going to Netscape.com by that time, and AOL tried to integrate as much of the My Netscape product into the failed My AOL product and actually brought My AOL back from the dead on iPlanet server. Traffic kept dropping over at Netscape.com and they finally put it out of its misery and redirected people to a somewhat revitalized My AOL product with the "Netscape" brand "chrome" on it. After all this, My AOL features were blended with AOL.COM and it survived to some success over the years. Today you go to my.netscape.com and it is my.aol.com with a Netscape "skin" running on a combination of Apache and AOLserver servers, the latter being an open-source project since 1999. -another ex-AOL employee.

Lots of people who are stuck with their email addresses in AOL. They don't want to change because they are afraid to lose business (the same a people don't like to change their mobile numbers). I wonder; the EU might make email address portability mandatory if we start shouting loud enough about this. Would you like that AOL? Do you really want to annoy us?

I wonder; the EU might make email address portability mandatory if we start shouting loud enough about this. Would you like that AOL? Do you really want to annoy us?

Is this really feasible?

Software and stuff uses the host part of the address to know where to send it, would there have to be a kind of secondary DNS system for email addresses or would it just be made mandatory that all existing servers are modified to do a kind of transparent forwarding.

I don't recall hearing of them ever doing anything to benefit the users.

Well, they did release AOLserver. From wikipedia:

"AOLserver was the first HTTP server program to combine multithreading, a built-in scripting language, and the pooling of persistent database connections. For database-backed Web sites, this enabled performance improvements of 100X compared to the standard practices at the time of CGI scripts that opened fresh database connections on every page load. Eventually other HTTP server programs

AOL are the folks behind Engadget, Joystiq, wow.com, autoblog, games.com etc. They are, for better or for worse still quite relevant (if much smaller), and apparently very good good at making people ignore their involvement in things. Probably a good thing.

AOL wants to flex what little muscle it has left and try to have an impact on something? KMA AOL, VLC is going to cast your SHOUTcast aside. No one will miss it, and more importantly, no one will miss AOL when it fades off into the sunset.

However, we are providing a way to integrate the "icecast directory" that provides an open source equivalent to SHOUTcast. If you know and like a radio station currently listed on the SHOUTcast directory, please make sure this radio is also available on the icecast directory and let the radio owner know about how AOL treats their content.

There's a replacement, it's free and user editable. Sounds like the death of SHOUTcast to me.

I don't see Shoutcast fading anywhere any time soon. There are 30,000 Shoutcast servers, serving half a million listeners during peak hours.

I mostly use Shoutcast to listen to public radio. I don't see these guys going to a lot of trouble to move away from Shoutcast just so people can use VLC. Even if they did, the main alternatives for them seem to be protocols from RealMedia and Microsoft, both of which have business models just as obnoxious as AOL's.

Doesn't VLC already come with DeCSS inside to decode DVD video? Isn't DeCSS "illegal software" ?... so why does that make this module any different? Can't they just ignore the injunction and keep going?

Promise I'm not trolling, just confused, or perhaps not understanding the situation.

Because that would be wrong. Open source software needs to set an example by respecting the licenses under which code is provided. Otherwise, we have no moral authority to go after companies that violate the GPL and demand that they post their code. DVD decoding is a bit different story, because of the fuzzyness of various laws that protect content, and your ability to use it in ways to make it compatible with your system.

What code is being provided here? They were rather vague, but it sounded to me like this "license" supposedly covers some sort of web API (the ShoutCAST Radio online directory), not the code used to access it, which was presumably written specifically for VLC under an OSS license.

This is an issue of the authors of some code demanding "adhere to our license or get rid of our code". Which I think everyone can understand the need to honor, if just as a matter of "do unto others, or else".

DeCSS is a completely different case. The code was written by a Norwegian named Jon Johansen, who not only did the cryptographic research to invent the algorithm in the first place, but wrote the code and then released it to the world. Copyright-wise, the code is legally open-source. And for all countries except the US, the code is legal for use. So for anyone outside the US, there aren't any legal problems with the code. And VLC isn't a US-developed piece of software (though to help Americans, DeCSS is distributed as a separate library under many linux distributions).

The only thing which taints the algorithm in the US is the "DCMA" law, which outlawed the use of any algorithms which circumvent a "copy protection scheme". The law is so broad that almost *anything* which alters the encoding of data (ROT13, etc) is a copy protection scheme; despite the fact that encrypting a DVD in no way prevents you from making copies of it (copies of encrypted bits play just like the original). So the DVD "CSS" encryption scheme doesn't even stop copying, yet it's able to wrap itself in the legal mantle the DCMA provides. What CSS *does* do is prevent you from playing a DVD unless the software author has paid a license fee to the people who created CSS (NOTE: not the people who creating the video codec it uses, that's just MPEG2). So all it does is stop you from making use of your fair use rights under US copyright law. It's your DVD, you have a right to play it, sell it, etc.

Now, you might argue that the DCMA, while unjust, is still the law, and Americans should abide by it. And that's a whole can of worms to which Slashdot has devoted many pages of discussion over the last decade. But initially, the effects of the DMCA were broader: worldwide, there were *no* open source DVD players. Period. Because the CSS algorithm wasn't even available in source form anywhere. DVD player authors worldwide had to pay a license just to link in a binary-only library. That is, until Jon Johansen (and cohorts) successfully reverse engineered the algorithm in a completely-legal-for-Norway manner (he was tried in court and found innocent of any wrongdoing). Thus allowing the rest of the world to watch dvds without having to pay money under a racket created by a US-only law.

And *thats* where DeCSS came from, and why it's nothing like this situation, which (while foot-and-bullet stupid) is perfectly within all internationally recognized rights of the authors.

I would be very careful with such broad assertions. Actually, some countries (like Germany and many others) worsened their Copyright laws significantly in the last couple of years, mimicking the US-DMCA w.r.t. anti-circumvention measures. DeCSS could very well be illegal there... but fortunately, they don't seem to care enforcing those anti-circumvention measures all that much (though they still could, if the US government puts enough pressure

This is an issue of the authors of some code demanding "adhere to our license or get rid of our code". Which I think everyone can understand the need to honor, if just as a matter of "do unto others, or else".

If this was an issue of getting rid of AOLs code, the VLC team could just reimplement it. This sounds more like a case of AOL asserting that they own copyright over the shoutcast API, and so any non-licensed implementation is infringing. This is a dubious interpretation of the law at best, but it wou

Open source software needs to set an example by respecting the licenses under which code is provided. Otherwise, we have no moral authority

You assume that those licenses have moral authority in the first place. It's not clear here that AOL wrote any of the code incorporated in VideoLan, so any moral authority they may assert is questionable.

Maybe the RIAA and RIAA-like companys simply raised the white flag on the CSS case, after all you may buy a legit DVD and wants to see then on your PC without need to buy extra (and generaly crappy) "licenced" software to be able to watch then.

DeCSS is only illegal under the DMCA and other "anti-circumvention" laws. Open source has a history of respecting copyrights, but the DMCA is completely different. The DMCA also doesn't exist in most countries, and OSS has no interest init being followed. OSS does have an interest in copyright and copyright does exist in most jurisdictions.

Drug company pens. They give those things out so freely that even people who don't even go to the doctor seem to have huge stashes of Levitra and Nexium pens.

My mom works in a doctor's office and she's literally got a drug rep keyboard, mouse, and mouse pad on her computer, along with lord knows how much other stuff (pens, pads, coffee mugs, hats, etc). I swear it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if she brought home a 46" LCD TV with a giant Lunesta logo in the corner.

And I'm sure that their overpriced drugs and the people who are being gouged for them are paying for all of that crapola. I'd rather they turn around and subsidize the cost for some of their lower income customers, but we all know *that* isn't about to happen.

I grew up with industry schwag as well, but that industry was far better off when it couldn't direct market to patients. Turns doctors into mere "prescribers".

Pharma is out of control in the US -- and they're more bloated and less "innovative" than ever.

Reverse engineering and design for interoperability is legal in the US. Unless there is an active patent or AOL's code is incorporated into VLC they don't have a leg to stand on and are just engaging in bully tactics. Considering that this is AOL I'm not surprised that they're likely to shift to the SCO business model and squeeze all they can from the fumes of their diminished empire.

Let me correct MY comments by adding that Oppenheimer misquoted the Gita as well; the actual passage reads (11.32): "Time I am, the great destroyer of the worlds, and I have come here to destroy all people. With the exception of you [the Pandavas], all the soldiers here on both sides will be slain."

"When sold or distributed to End Users, the Integrated Product shall not [...] (c) incorporate any Publically Available Software, in whole or in part, in a manner that may subject SHOUTcast Radio or the SHOUTcast Radio Materials, in whole or in part, to all or part of the license obligations of any Publically Available Software. As used herein, the term "Publicly Available Software" means any software that contains, or is derived in any manner (in whole or in part) from, any software that is distributed as free software, open source software or similar licensing or distribution models; and that requires as a condition of use, modification or distribution that such software or other software incorporated into, derived from or distributed with such software: (1) be disclosed or distributed in source code form; (2) be licensed for the purpose of making derivative works; or (3) be redistributable at no charge." (Emphasis mine)

This is a standard provision that is part of any license agreement for commercial software, and all it says is that you can't distribute the software in a way that makes it subject to the GFDL or some other Free license.

As an iPhone developer, I can tell you the majority of streaming radio apps on mobile phones are listening to Shoutcast servers. That's where most of the money lies for AOL/Nullsoft in Shoutcast. The protocol is very simple and similar to HTTP so the iPhone OS supports it (sort of) out of the box, and some of the more advanced features (like in-stream song names) can be taken advantage of by manipulating the HTTP headers.

XBMC as it started out was a project that for the vast majority of it's users was illegal to possess a compiled copy of it. With the release (and shifting of main focus to) of the non-Xbox versions that's changed, but somehow I really doubt that XBMC cares too much what AOL thinks. They're liable to just declare the project closed source and keep having unexplained "leaks" of the code.

SHOUTcast is just a bad copy of icecast [icecast.org]. Keep using icecast [icecast.org] for your audio and video streaming and do not accept lesser, closed source imitations.

I do hope that the specific VLC developers involved with the shoutcast fiasco get the drubbing they deserve, if for no other reason than as an example for others and as payment for the trouble they've caused the rest of the project. It's 2010, closed source does not belong on the net and FOSS developers have no business undercutting FOSS projects.

I'm not talking about icecast as a directory client. I'm talking about the module that was removed from VLC. Read the press release from VideoLAN [videolan.org]:

SHOUTcast Radio is a web site which provides a directory of radio stations avalaible on the Internet. It provides categorizations of such stations, so it is easier to find one that matches your interest. According to users feedback, the integration of such directory inside VLC is one of the best features of the software.

Most of the "closed source" stuff is based on "ripped off" FreeBSD. Juniper routers; MPLS switches most of the ATM core etc. etc. If there was no closed source then we'd have a chance that these things were running an OS their owners could audit. The fact that the BSD developers supported this happening is not to their credit.

No they didn't. AOL employees do not have the power to issue injunctions. They may have received some sort of "cease and desist" letters, but those have no force of law. The VLC developers need to consult an attorney. Are they using AOL-copyrighted code? If so, why?

You didn't get 'several email injunctions from AOL employees'. A judge puts an injunction into place. AOL asked you to stop. It may have lead to an injunction at some point had you told them to piss off, but you complied, and thats where it ended.

The 'license issue' you quoted also basically says 'if your software license imposes restrictions that are anti-closed source software, then we don't want to play with you.' This is pretty much identical to the point of GPL but in the other direction. Same stu

The letters all refer to something called the "Shoutcast Radio." This is the free, yet proprietary, directory of people using Shoutcast servers to serve audio data. I don't see anything that talks about the protocol itself, which is open and is used to serve audio to tens of millions of iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch users via apps like iheartradio, CBS Radio, and many others.

This isn't such a big deal but I sure hope the VLC people don't think it means they should remove the Shoutcast streaming protocol, which i

I remember something about junk mail in the form of floppy's and CD's but its all so blurry.
AOL used to sell something didn't they? well it escapes me. At least they found a way to make themselves even less relevant. I almost thought it couldn't be done

I have an older version of VLC already installed. My first thought was "keep the old version so not to give up a function". Then I realized that I never listen to shoutcast, and likely never will. So why bother to even worry about it? If AOL wants to further isolate themselves from the rest of the community because of concern that someone might be spared from some of their obnoxious ads, by all means let them. Too bad that no one who actually understands the issue will be there the day that AOL execs sit ar

I've operated a media distribution system (mostly video ppv) for about a decade. About 7 years ago, I ended up blocking the AOL browser completely. It was a worthless piece of shit that caused 50% of our customer service issues. Coupled with their idiotic "no refresh for 30 days" DNS servers (which means any time you moved a website to a new IP, it "vanished" for a month for all AOLosers) and their proxy servers that made tracking large-scale credit card fraud extremely difficult, it literally cost us money to even have AOLosers in the customer base. I was in the process of compiling a list of AOL IP ranges and had plans to block them completely when they finally rolled over and died in the dial-up market. Almost overnight, they became 99% irrelevant and my life got so much easier, I was able to start taking regular vacations.

In summation, GO TO HELL, AOL! You're nothing but a festering boil on the ass of the internet and your rotting corpse needs to be dumped into an active volcano.

Was VLC incorporating code supplied by AOL under a copyright licence or is AOL trying to overextend copyright to cover any implementation? I did RTFA but I'm none the wiser. Unfortunately, the licence PDF is now a 404 page.

Hi all. We were disappointed to see VLC's announcement today that they were removing access to the SHOUTcast service in VLC. While the SHOUTcast service is proprietary, SHOUTcast has always supported open source development since its birth in 1999 and we will continue to do so in the future. The SHOUTcast API terms of service allow the SHOUTcast API to be incorporated into open source software applications via SHOUTcast API partner program so long as the terms of such open source software do not subject SHOUTcast Radio or the SHOUTcast service to the open source terms.
VLC's comment that the SHOUTcast Toolbar is spyware is not accurate. The SHOUTcast Toolbar is not spyware. The SHOUTcast toolbar may only be downloaded by a user upon their prior consent.
We will be reaching out directly to VLC to clear up any confusion that exists about this situation.